History Ireland Hedge School: Ireland and the United States from 1917 to Trump

History Ireland Hedge School: Ireland and the United States from 1917 to Trump

Tuesday 23 May, 7pm

Join History Ireland editor Tommy Graham and panellists Michael Kennedy (RIA's Documents on Irish Foreign Policy), Bernadette Whelan (UL), Patrick Geoghegan (TCD) and John Borgonovo (UCC) for a for a lively round table discussion on Ireland and the USA, from 1917 when the US entered the War to the election of Donald Trump.

The 1916 Rising had cast Ireland’s ‘exiled children in America’ in the role of potential subversives, in league with Imperial Germany. After the war Irish nationalists discovered that President Woodrow Wilson’s advocacy of self-determination did not apply to the subject nations of the victorious Allied powers. Relations reached their nadir with US ambassador David Gray’s ‘American note’ of February 1944, implicitly threatening violation of Ireland’s neutrality unless Dublin’s Axis missions were expelled. Things only improved in the wake of John F Kennedy’s 1963 visit, and reached their high point with the ‘shamrock diplomacy’ of the Clinton era. But where stands the ‘unique relationship’ in the wake of the election of Donald Trump?